Homs in May when an Iran-brokered deal allowed anti-Assad fighters to leave, along with a handful of non-combatants who survived the two-year siege. Photograph: Reuters

Adnan Azzam has his work cut out. Every room in his second-floor apartment in the old city of Homs bears the scars of war: there’s a shell hole in the corner of the children’s bedroom and drawers are missing from the glass-fronted cabinets in the ornate salon. They were chopped up for firewood by the rebels who occupied the flat, did their cooking on the stairwell and left scorch marks on the whitewashed wall.

On the street outside, a poster warns returning residents to beware if they come across any of the many kinds of munitions and weapons – mortar bombs, rockets, grenades – that were used in the vicious battle for Syria’s third-largest city and the “capital” of the revolution that tried – and has failed – to topple President Bashar al-Assad. “Keep away, do not touch and inform others if you see any of these,” it urges.

Azzam is one of a few dozen people who have come back to the Christian quarter since a deal brokered by Iran allowed anti-Assad fighters to leave, along with a handful of non-combatants who survived the two-year siege. The May agreement was a microcosm of how the Syrian conflict is being managed in its fourth year. Nine hundred rebels were allowed out, with their guns, to fight another day. Elsewhere, though, the war goes on.

“My apartment is in better condition than many others,” says the retired engineer, who fled to a nearby village in early 2012. “The fighters usually lived on the ground floor in case they were bombed. This used to be a nice neighbourhood. Both sides are to blame. Now people are coming to clean up their homes and clear out the rubbish. But the government can’t afford to pay for all the damage. Maybe they are waiting for international aid? And I can’t bring my family back yet.”

Azzam’s downstairs neighbour, Abdullah Sabbagh, has secured his front door with a hefty padlock to deter thieves. Anas, who lives round the corner, complains that he needs a new kitchen and bathroom but has yet to receive any official compensation – a process that involves getting a police report and taking it to the municipality. Water has been restored but electricity supplies are sporadic.

Syrian government control is not in doubt in most of Homs. Photograph: Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images

Still, milestones of recovery are being marked. This month the first wedding since what Assad loyalists call the liberation was celebrated in the quarter’s first-century Syriac Orthodox church, Umm al-Zennar. And Bayt al-Agha, the nearby Ottoman-era restaurant, its distinctive alternating black and white stone structure now half-destroyed, was open for business during the football World Cup in Brazil. But after dark, the alleyways are eerily deserted, ghostly figures emerging from security checkpoints as vehicles approach. It will be many years before it is picturesque again.

By day the scale of the destruction in Homs is shocking. Buildings are battered and pockmarked or floors pancaked on top of each other. There are only dark, charred spaces where windows used to be. Slogans scrawled on walls tell fragments of the story: “Welcome the people of Jihad,” reads one. Others advertise al-Farouq – one of the first brigades of the Free Syrian Army, the mainstream rebel alliance. In the moonscape of the Bab Hud neighbourhood, on the frontline by the Homs Citadel, a commander signed himself Issam Abu al-Mout – a nom de guerre that is a chilling reference to a man boasting of facing death.

Residents return to inspect their homes in the Wadi Al-Sayeh neighbourhood of Homs in May following the fall of the city to Assad forces. Photograph: Omar Sanadiki/Reuters

Images of victory have been plastered everywhere. On a blackened, skeletal structure opposite the Khalid ibn al-Walid mosque a long banner of Assad, in sober suit rather than his favoured camouflage commando chic, flutters in the hot wind. “Together we will rebuild,” it declares. Bulldozers have started to clear gaps in the rubble. Cheerful street paintings – part of a “Homs in my heart” campaign – brighten up the dusty, dun-coloured view.

In Damascus the ministry of information, which controls visas and access for foreign media, is keen to approve trips to Homs, where developments broadly fit the official grand narrative of a return to normality, stability and the start of reconstruction – and of course the victory claimed by Assad.

Syrian government control is not in doubt. The drive from the capital to Homs is a little longer than in prewar days because of a detour required to avoid the risk of encountering snipers on the main road, and there are maddeningly frequent checkpoints where bored soldiers demand IDs and search vehicles. To the north, towards Aleppo and areas held by Isis (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), the rumble of artillery fire can be heard.

Members of National Defence Army inspect a taxi in Wadi Dahab, an Alawite area of Homs that has been the target of recent car bombings. Photograph: Anwat Amro/AFP/Getty Images

The city is not entirely safe. In Wadi Dahab, a densely populated Alawite area of Homs, fresh rubble marks the sites of recent car bombings – one of them claimed by Jabhat al-Nusra, the homegrown Syrian jihadi group which has pledged allegiance to al-Qaida. Shopkeepers have placed oil drums on the pavement to try to put some distance between themselves and any blast.

No one knows exactly how many Homsis have fled abroad, or how many are displaced inside Syria. But last month the UNHCR still counted more than 352,000 people from the city registered as refugees, the majority in neighbouring Lebanon – a quarter to a fifth of the prewar population. Rumours abound of abandoned property in pro-opposition areas being taken over by Alawite loyalists and looting by the widely disliked, Iranian-trained National Defence Army. Statistics are not available.

Opposition activists now living elsewhere reject the government’s upbeat narrative. “Homs is a city of horror,” said Razan, whose Sunni family was involved in the mass protests of April 2011 and suffered in the subsequent army offensive and repression. “If there had been a real solution people would be able to go back, but hundreds are still in prison. The government is removing some checkpoints and trying to show that everything is fine. But it’s crazy how they’ve managed to cover it all up and brainwash people just by saying, ‘Let’s move on.’”

Samer, a wealthy businessman, puts it bluntly: “The whole thing is designed to snuff out the rebellion.”

At al-Waer, a couple of miles to the west, a war of sorts continues. Like other rebel-held areas across Syria, this part of Homs is still under siege. The top flats of several tower blocks are burned out – hit by government artillery taking out snipers. But it is a mostly static and curiously intimate sort of conflict. Residents, including state employees, commute in and out of the suburb every day to work or study, going past army and rebel roadblocks that are just a couple of hundred yards apart. Skinny boys scamper to and fro earning a few pounds carrying shopping across the space between them. Negotiations on the terms of access, and perhaps an eventual old city-type evacuation deal, are continuing sporadically.

“It’s hard, especially for the children, and the main worry is their psychological welfare,” says Afra, a law student, glancing warily at the uniformed security officer loitering nearby as she describes the situation inside. “As an adult you can cope, but the little ones don’t understand what’s happening. They are afraid of sudden noises and if a door slams they jump.”

Omar, a middle-aged shop owner, says the fighters in al-Waer are Syrians, many of them locals – not the foreigners who are vilified in state media – and mostly keep themselves to themselves. “Two days ago they started shooting at each other. When that happens it’s scary and we want the army to go in. We are tired. I bought a new house and it’s lost its value. We want to get this over with.” That sense of weariness is widely shared – in Homs and beyond.

“I used to go to work every day and hear the sound of snipers’ bullets,” says Samar, an Alawite official in the Homs regional education department. In 2012 she and her family relocated to a flat further away from the old city but still not out of range of rebel mortars. “The worst thing was the fear of kidnapping,” she says. “Sometimes we didn’t take out the garbage for days for fear of being in the street. But things are much better now.” Anas, her daughter, describes being forced to wear the hijab as anti-regime protests swelled in the heyday of Syria’s bloody Arab spring.

Yet there is also a determination to look ahead and to try to accentuate the positive. “At one point this did become a sectarian conflict,” says Nazem Kanawati, another Christian who has moved back home to old Homs and is doing his bit for the cleanup campaign. “But, look, the mosque is closer to my home than the church. It is part of my heritage too. Remember: Europe was completely destroyed after the second world war and it was able to recover. I feel there is a bright future ahead. The wounds of war can be healed.”

Waheed was an ordinary boy who played football and loved sci-fi movies. This year, he blew himself up in Aleppo. Randeep Ramesh talks to Britons risking their lives in Syria, and the families left behind